


Motherly

by JRaylin441



Series: Briareus [9]
Category: Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types, Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: Emergency room, Future Fic, Gen, Originally Posted on FanFiction.Net
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-08
Updated: 2016-06-08
Packaged: 2018-07-13 02:11:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,969
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7134434
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JRaylin441/pseuds/JRaylin441
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Danny is having a really terrible time dealing with his concussion, and then the screaming, cursing teenager comes storming into the room.</p>
<p> <i>“Don’t even think about it. You know the rules. Wait out here,” the nurse had ordered. The man had whirled around, grateful to finally have a physical target, and had fired off six curse words at the same time, so that the sound garbled together into an animalistic snarl.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Motherly

If the guy in the corner did not _shut up_ in the next two seconds, Danny was going to leap across the flimsy wall of chairs and _make him_.

A sudden, steel-band-squeezing agony clenched at his forehead and he briefly reconsidered the mental threat.

But it wasn’t like it was his fault. It was Saturday night, and the last thing that Danny had planned on doing was sitting, dazed, on a stiff wooden chair as his ass slowly fell asleep, waiting for a nurse to call his name. He had planned on spending it out with his friends, hopping from cheap bar to cheap bar until they got lucky.

He was already halfway to flat-out drunk, and that probably wasn’t helping the dizzy swimming feeling in his head. It had probably also caused a lot of the trouble in the first place. Balancing on top of a fence like a tightrope had seemed like a good idea at the time, but then he was face-to-face with the concrete and when had that happened? His friends had formed a flustered swarm around him, before one of them got the bright idea to spirit him away to the hospital. They had left him there, on the physically abusive chairs, since all of them were underage and half of them couldn’t afford to get caught drunk _again_.

Another pulse of pressure rippled across his brain, and by the time he had finished riding it out he was laid out on the chairs. Too tired to muster up the motivation to sit up, he decided to gaze at the room around him from his new position.

The walls were a bright white that really wasn’t helping with the whole headache issue. The room itself was rather spacious, as if they were expecting a whole lot more people than this, which was a rather morbid thought. The chairs were worn and wooden, with backs too straight to do anything more than make you lay down over three or four. When his friends had whisked him through the doors and into a chair, he had been the only person in here, aside from a quiet woman in the corner, who was wringing her hands and crying softly. A few minutes later, a nurse had appeared and taken her away, leaving Danny to his own devices.

Leaving Danny to doze off.

It was the slamming of the door that had woken him, as someone kicked it in and sprinted through the half-open space. The person had been moving fast enough that Danny’s eyes couldn’t really get a fix on him, registering only a blur of gold-red-brown-white. He, Danny had assumed it was a he, it sounded like a he, had been yelling out a steady stream of curses that seemed to be serving as an excuse to say something rather than an attempt at communication.

The nurse at the desk hadn’t seemed the slightest bit surprised, calling out a sharp ‘doctor!’ over her shoulder. Then there had been another small flurry of action as two men and a stretcher came out the doors (where had they been all this time, because Danny’s head hurt like a bitch and it had been at least an hour at this point), shifted the redder part of the blur onto the stretcher, and vanished back within the bowels of the hospital. The cursing man, while still a hurricane of motion, began to come into focus, just in time for Danny to watch him try to follow the men into the hospital.

“Don’t even think about it. You know the rules. Wait out here,” the nurse had ordered.

The man had whirled around, grateful to finally have a physical target, and had fired off six curse words at the same time, so that the sound garbled together into an animalistic snarl.

The woman’s face had softened a bit, inexplicably. “Your brother will be out in a little while. We will let you know as soon as possible.”

And the blur had stormed off to the corner.

The guy was in focus now. Long gold hair pulled back in a high ponytail. Probably in his late teens. At the moment, he seemed to be more animal than human as he paced back and forth on the other side of the room, stalking from end to end at a speed that made his hair whip the air each time he turned. He was keeping up the litany of curses, at no small volume, and the sound was beginning to cause a buildup of pain just above Danny’s eyebrows. The motion probably wasn’t helping either, as Danny tried to follow Goldilocks with his eyes and kept finding himself staring blankly at the wall, eyes refusing to track.

“Shit!” It was the most recent of the curses, but the teen used it like punctuation, abandoning his current task and turning his wrath on the nearest chair. He lashed out with his left foot, and one of the legs splintered into pieces as a hollow ring cut the air. Or maybe that was just inside Danny’s head. Apparently unsatisfied, Goldilocks switched to the other foot, slamming it into the leg of the chair until it was a pulpy mess.

The noise was going to shatter Danny’s skull.

“Hey man. Could you relax?” The words came out a mumbled, slurred mess, so he wasn’t really surprised when the mutilation of property continued unimpeded.

Danny stumbled to his feet and weaved his way over to the gory scene. The teen was so busy venting his anger that he didn’t notice the approach until a hand rested on his shoulder.

It all happened a bit too fast for his muddled mind to register, but the next thing he knew, Danny was being held up against the wall by a forearm at his throat. Goldilocks’s face was twisted up in a terrifying scowl and his golden eyes (who the hell had golden eyes? It felt like getting stared down by a wolf) bored into Danny’s brain. A brain that hid a large part of Danny inside a cage of alcohol: the logical part of Danny, which was screaming _holy shit holy shit getawaygetawaygetaway_.

The rest of his brain, however, was not listening.

“Hey, you’re that alchemist guy, right? The Allmetal one, right? Yeah, I saw you in the newspaper.” As Danny’s tongue bumbled its way through the words, the back of his brain was watching carefully as the sanity seemed to drain back into the famous alchemist’s eyes. Slowly, the pressure on his throat let up, and Danny coughed absently as he was let back onto the ground.

“What the hell are you doing up? Sit down before you fall on your ass.” The words were gruff and carelessly tossed out, the curse words like a verbal tick rather than interjections. A heavy hand came down on Danny’s shoulder, and his body slumped into the seat next to the broken one. Without consulting him, his left hand began mindlessly fiddling with the rough edges of the leg.

The guy was still pacing, but he kept his words to himself this time, muttered under his breath while his shoes scuffed the floor. Still not silent, but more rhythmic.

Danny fought a losing battle with his eyelids, before giving up, making sure that when he slid sideways, it wasn’t onto the broken chair.

Just as he felt his hold on consciousness fade, a finger poked at his cheek sharply.

“Hey. Don’t go to sleep. You’ve got a head wound.” The guy was right up in his face, seeming to check his health by watching his eyes, and in return Danny could see the panic at the edges of the alchemist’s vision. It was clear that he was only taking a temporary reprieve from his mental breakdown to check on the other guy in the waiting room with him. Even so, he didn’t leave until the one in danger of dying was sitting up straight in the hard-backed chairs, staring somewhat lucidly at the world around him.

“Edward Elric?” There was a doctor at the door, calling the well-known name as if it were something he had done many times before, and a switch seemed to flick in Edward’s body. He turned around, reminiscent of a dog responding to a whistle.

“Is Al okay?” The words should have been a question, but they entered the world like a flat demand.

The doctor sighed, as though he expected nothing less. “Your brother is fine.” The tense muscles in the blonde’s shoulders released like a puppet’s strings being cut. Instantly, there was a transformation from rabid wolf to lazy guard dog. Still alert, but more sane. The doctor continued. “Now if you would like to-.”

“Take me to him.” Edward was already striding across the room and through the door before the sentence finished leaving his mouth. The doctor was left with nothing to do but follow him, which he did after a conspiratorial wink with the nurse at the desk. As the door swung shut behind him, Danny caught a last few words from the alchemist as he made his way toward ‘Al’. “Shouldn’t you get someone out there to deal with Mr. Head Wound? I’m pretty sure he’s drunk and-.” The door closed fully and the words were cut off.

Again, Danny was left alone.

Despite his best efforts, it was moments before he started to doze off again, now that the mental stimulation provided by Edward Elric had vanished.

“Daniel Keller.” A clinical voice woke him up this time, not nearly as effectively as a poke in the face. Still, Danny stumbled to his feet and started shuffling toward the door. His mind was too exhausted to comment more than a whispered _finally_.

“If you will follow me, please.” Thankfully, the doctor didn’t walk very quickly, seeming to take Danny’s injuries into account. They made their slow progress down the hall toward a check-up room.

As they passed the last door before their own, Danny glanced inside and then paused.

A teenager with close-cropped golden hair was staring back at him from a hospital bed. A bit of bandaging was peeking out from the collar of his hospital gown. A head of long, golden hair was slumped over on the bed. It seemed that Edward Elric had rushed into the room, only to pull up a chair and promptly fall asleep, draped possessively over his younger brother.

“Thank you for keeping Brother calm.” The voice was lower and smoother than Danny had expected after hearing the older sibling talk.

He smothered a scoff. “I don’t think there’s a human alive who could have kept your brother calm.”

The teen laughed then, and it was a cheerful, bright laugh that fit so incongruously with the impression Danny had of Edward. “No, he always does better when there’s someone else to look out for. He hates feeling useless. You did a lot of good just by being there, so thanks.”

The bright smile was making Danny a bit uncomfortable (because seriously, how had the kid ended up so _friendly_ ), but he smile back all the same. “Glad I could help. I’ll make sure to get injured more often.” The attempt at a sweeping bow was, admittedly, not his brightest moment, and the doctor that had been waiting patiently on the sidelines took that moment to swoop in.

“Okay. Time to get you looked over. You take care, Alphonse. And look after your brother too. We see entirely too much of the two of you here. Try to stay out of trouble.” He closed the door on the sound of another laugh.

Danny continued his stumble down the hall to the location of his check up and wondered what his friends were doing right then.

**Author's Note:**

> So, I'm not really sure where in the timeline this story falls... I'm thinking maybe the brothers meet up again at some point during their travels, and since they're both so prone to injury, they end up in the hospital all the time. As for Ed, he may have been overreacting a little bit when looking at the severity of Al's injury but, well, it's _Al_ , so can you really blame him?


End file.
